Wonderful Tunes Provided By Friends. Wild Tangents Provided By Me.

Posts tagged ‘smoking’

The clip is from “The Garry Moore Show” which ran on television from 1958 to 1967. I couldn’t find the exact date for this particular episode but judging by the quartet line up I’d say it was probably 1959 or 1960. I was cellular at the time myself which I think qualifies as me “young people.” That must be why I like it.

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet was probably on the show to promote the 1959 album “What Is There To Say” but, interestingly enough, they didn’t play a song from the album. Credible sounding YouTube people seem to think the song they played was “Bernie’s Tune” with the melody removed. I tried humming the melody on top of the song they were playing and it fits perfectly so I’ll buy that and report it as fact.

The person who posted this video added absolutely no helpful information in the blurb so all hail “random YouTube commenter whose screen name had the word ‘jazz’ in it” for (probably) knowing the name of the song.” Also hail my buddy “Encyclopedia Brown” for knowing the song was introduced by Garry Moore. I seriously doubt my poor Google skills would have turned up the name so I’d probably have spent the entire post calling the poor man “Smokey The Host.”

“So What” is a Bill Evans composition and it’s the first track off the 1959 Miles Davis album “Kind Of Blue.” According to Wikipedia it is one of the best known examples of modal jazz. It’s 16 bars of D Dorian followed by 8 bars of E flat Dorian. The song is so nifty it even has a chord named after it in music circles! My extensive knowledge of music theory has led me to the following conclusion: Dorian is a pretty word.

How did any of us survive the 60’s and 70’s? Absolutely everything we did was deadly back then. All of our toys were pointy, explosive, and covered in sweet delicious lead paint. All of our buildings were stuffed with asbestos. We ate nothing but lard fried pork products and EVERYTHING contained sugar. We never wore seat belts and my only car seat was my momma’s lap! My grandparents smoked like chimneys through all of 8 healthy pregnancies between them. While I was watching this video I noticed that all of these men, whose livelihoods depended on their ability to breath, were either smoking or enjoying the rich satisfying flavor of second hand smoke and absolutely no one seems disturbed. Heck it never bothered me when I was a kid either. Now that we’re living in the germ free, bubble wrapped 21st century any prolonged exposure to cigarette smoke sends me into sinus purgatory!

PS Completely off the point but Miles Davis is the scariest looking man who ever lived. Period.